talking about icord edging
I have complete knitting angst. (Or at least had complete knitting angst when I wrote the first draft of this post last night. It's a much more rational sounding post this morning, after a major edit.)
I was all content finishing the seaming, and actually found weaving in ends to be soothing. Then I started the icord edging. It just wasn't turning out well. The method described in the pattern is a lot bulkier than I'd like, and I frankly think it looks sloppy. I did some searching and found the method I used for the BPT cardigan. I'm going to use that method, instead. I was wearing BPT last night, and comparing that icord edging to what I was getting on Samus was very convincing.
What's the difference between the two methods? The method described for Samus is a 4 stitch icord, and you attach it to the body by slipping the last stitch, picking up a stitch from the body, and psso. I found that that left a weird indentation, was prone to weird lumps, and that the nicer looking part of the icord ended up being on the inside of the sweater. (But not nice enough to do it inside out, so that part ended up on the outside.) I'm going to go back to this method. I'm fairly certain that's what I used for BPT. It's a 3 stitch icord, and you k2 tog tbl to attach the icord to the sweater. With the BPT, I was working with live stitches, since it was a top-down raglan. Since the Samus doesn't have live stitches to work with, I think I'm going to go and pick up large groups of stitches before I start the edging. Maybe an 8" DPN worth of stitches at a time. That should make things a bit less tedious than picking up stitches one by one. (And for the record, I actually got a bit better at picking up stitches with needles last night. I just didn't want to bother with a crochet hook. It was a bit of a pain, but I'm not as hopeless at it as I used to be. I think the very springy yarn and relatively loose knit helped a lot.)
I actually tried doing a plain single crochet edging on Samus after I pulled out the 4 stitch icord, but that looked a little wimpy, and it seems to be very unforgiving if I did't get exactly the right proportion of single crochet stitches to rows of knitting.
Do any of you have other preferred icord edging methods? I'm happy with the method I linked above, but I'm curious to hear about others, if you have any.
Whether there will be actual progress on Samus to report on tomorrow is up in the air. Last night, I was prepared to toss the poor thing across the room and not speak to it again until this weekend. I was all set to cast on for A's hat today. Now I feel more at peace with Samus and its theoretical future icord, but I may still at least swatch for the hat today. It would be nice to bring Samus to the knitting group tomorrow to work on the edging. I have a feeling a lot of my knitting groupies haven't done that sort of edging before, so it would be a cool educational experience for me to show it to them. Plus, they might ask about how I did it when I show off the finished sweater, and it's the kind of thing that's easier to demonstrate than to explain.
I was all content finishing the seaming, and actually found weaving in ends to be soothing. Then I started the icord edging. It just wasn't turning out well. The method described in the pattern is a lot bulkier than I'd like, and I frankly think it looks sloppy. I did some searching and found the method I used for the BPT cardigan. I'm going to use that method, instead. I was wearing BPT last night, and comparing that icord edging to what I was getting on Samus was very convincing.
What's the difference between the two methods? The method described for Samus is a 4 stitch icord, and you attach it to the body by slipping the last stitch, picking up a stitch from the body, and psso. I found that that left a weird indentation, was prone to weird lumps, and that the nicer looking part of the icord ended up being on the inside of the sweater. (But not nice enough to do it inside out, so that part ended up on the outside.) I'm going to go back to this method. I'm fairly certain that's what I used for BPT. It's a 3 stitch icord, and you k2 tog tbl to attach the icord to the sweater. With the BPT, I was working with live stitches, since it was a top-down raglan. Since the Samus doesn't have live stitches to work with, I think I'm going to go and pick up large groups of stitches before I start the edging. Maybe an 8" DPN worth of stitches at a time. That should make things a bit less tedious than picking up stitches one by one. (And for the record, I actually got a bit better at picking up stitches with needles last night. I just didn't want to bother with a crochet hook. It was a bit of a pain, but I'm not as hopeless at it as I used to be. I think the very springy yarn and relatively loose knit helped a lot.)
I actually tried doing a plain single crochet edging on Samus after I pulled out the 4 stitch icord, but that looked a little wimpy, and it seems to be very unforgiving if I did't get exactly the right proportion of single crochet stitches to rows of knitting.
Do any of you have other preferred icord edging methods? I'm happy with the method I linked above, but I'm curious to hear about others, if you have any.
Whether there will be actual progress on Samus to report on tomorrow is up in the air. Last night, I was prepared to toss the poor thing across the room and not speak to it again until this weekend. I was all set to cast on for A's hat today. Now I feel more at peace with Samus and its theoretical future icord, but I may still at least swatch for the hat today. It would be nice to bring Samus to the knitting group tomorrow to work on the edging. I have a feeling a lot of my knitting groupies haven't done that sort of edging before, so it would be a cool educational experience for me to show it to them. Plus, they might ask about how I did it when I show off the finished sweater, and it's the kind of thing that's easier to demonstrate than to explain.
posted by Rebekkah at 8:51 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home